Speculating on the Future in Postcolonial Social Sciences

How does technoscience dream? How might technical practices that bring
into apprehension a world that is not yet here, and may never come to
pass, be thought of as a kind of technoscientific dreaming? Beyond
debates over whether artificial intelligence technologies or computers
have a consciousness within them, and hence perhaps a dream life, this
trilogy of essays considers how more prosaic social science
technoscientific practices make shared dreamscapes. In asking how
technoscience might dream, I want to think about the ways assemblies of
technical practices have generated not just facts but also speculative
phenomena that are a felt part of the world, even if intangible. How do
speculative social science practices produce a world where undecided
futures are brought into the present?

Speculation is a particular way of making futurity within the longer
history of ways of positing the future.1 Broadly, speculation is an
orientation of conjecture towards an uncertain horizon of expectation.
The term is used generously to gather together wide ranging practices
from a genre of fiction writing to high-stakes finance. One root of the
meaning of speculation is observation, and thus the term also evokes
ways of envisioning and bringing into awareness what is yet undecided.
Speculation, used in this way, names epistemic practices in which future
potentialities are summoned and become palpable in the present, whether
or not they ever come to pass.2In financial speculation, a risky
future is betted on in order to beckon high rates of financial return.
In speculative fiction, a beyond to reality is conjured, often in ways
that generates ethical or political attachments to a realm of
possibility, of what could be. As a way of summoning future potentials
and apprehending the intangible, speculation is kin to practices of
imagination, fantasy, and dreaming. In this series of essays, I consider
speculation to be a kind of technoscientific dreaming. Moreover, in the
essays that follow I will give focus to this claim by tracking how girls
and women have been important figures of technoscientific dreaming in
twentieth century social science; their possible futures have been
attached to projects of rejuvenating the macro-phenomena of society, the
economy, populations, modernity, and nation-states. Entangled with
governmentalities, twentieth century social science practices have
helped to populate postcolonial dreamscapes with speculative futures for
women and girls.

Dreaming is an activity that exceeds both rationality and materiality
and yet is felt and consequential, and so I use dreaming here to think
about the shared imaginaries and horizons of expectation that
technoscientific practices populate the world with. As a kind of
dreaming, speculation gives form to the future, yet nonetheless still
involves an untethering from the present; it is a jump into the
intangible yet-to-be, could be, and the undecided, even if the
speculative practices themselves are rigorous methods of prediction,
calculation, and extrapolation with respected pedigrees. Speculation
tacks between intangibles, unknowns, and undecideds, on the one side,
and epistemic practices of writing, calculation, and modelling, on the
other. Within late twentieth century nation-states, technoscience
dreamscapes were composed of potent intangibles such as the
macroeconomy given to us by economic
models and the index of GDP, or the web of social
relations
that entangle us mapped by sociologists and marketers. Intangible and
speculative phenomena include forceful and significant forms such as
population dynamics, the national
economy, and
consumer
confidence,
each of which secures the cosmology that politicians, scientists,
academics, and lay people inhabit. Practices of calculating
probabilities, modelling, forecasting, and scenario building are all, at
least in part, examples of technoscientific dreaming performed by the
assemblies of instruments, practices, logics, and habits that make up
technoscience. While the history of science habitually emphasizes the
rationalizing, computational, and statistical dimensions of speculative
practices, in this trifecta of short essays I am interested in attending
to the work of feeling futures and apprehending intangibilities that
technoscience also accomplishes.

To think about a technoscience that dreams, it is helpful to turn to
Walter Benjamin, who, writing about the modernity of 19th century
Paris, described the
“phantasmagoria”
that commodity capitalism built into the materiality of shopping arcades
and consumer products.3
Phantasmagoria
was a form of European theatre in the late 18th and 19th centuries
that used a modified magic lantern to make projections of bizarre,
fabulous, and often frightening spectres. Phantasmagoria thus served as
a kind of “spectral technology” that projected imaginaries into the
world for viewers to join.4 Such projections were emotionally
charged, provoking collectively experienced affect, and stirring
audiences to question their senses and reality. For Benjamin, the modern
city produced its own mass phantasma—collective dreamscapes that
intoxicated urban life with the promissory potentials of an
industrialized world. One of the tasks of the historian, according to
Benjamin, was to attune to these collective phantasma and take notice of
the world as constituted by historically specific shared imaginaries
that were profoundly entangled with the concreteness of things.

In this spirit, speculation can be thought of as phantasma generating
practices that for the past hundred years have offered a potent mode for
orienting towards the future. While the phantasmagoria of the 19th
century theatre had been associated primarily with gothic and horror
performance, recent speculative phantasma are instead amorphous
politically and emotionally. Moreover, while the phantasmagoria of the
19th century theatre were consciously created as illusions, I suggest
that the phantasma of technocientific dreaming are decidedly not
illusions, but rather constitutive of a world that includes felt and
potent intangibles, a world in which technoscience dreaming – the
generation and attachment to of a palpable yet-to-be – is core to so
many social science practices. When the future is at stake in so much
technoscience, then dreaming futures is one of its central activities.
Within technoscience, phantasma accompany quantification as another kind
of output, as the felt, aspirational, and consequential imaginaries that
structure the world in profound ways, as a potent aura in surfeit of
facticity.

The scholarly manifesto Speculate This! describes speculation as
“a pressing toward an apprehension of the unknown,” suggesting that
elusive futures can be felt and given form even if they are not fixed or
fully legible.5 The manifesto suggests that this pressing towards the
unknown can be divided into two different modes of conjuring future
possibility: “affirmative speculation,” which attempts to experiment
with and reopen the future against the hegemonic, as contrasted with
“firmative speculation” which narrows potentialities to then exploit and
foreclose them.6 For the manifesto, afrofuturism, speculative
fiction, and contemporary techno-art are generative arenas of
affirmative speculation. Good affirmative speculation opens imaginaries
and potentials for other worlds, while bad technoscientific and economic
speculation is “firmative” because it aims to fix possibilities so that
they might be gamed to benefit only the few. This binary of opening and
closing is an enticing framework for making sense of the politics of
speculation, even if most speculative practices neither obey such moral
neatness nor fit into an art versus science divide. What this
distinction suggests, however, is that speculative practices do not
merely amplify and expand uncertainty and possibility, but can by
contrast restrain and limit the scope of futurity. When technoscience
dreams futures, such dreams are not necessarily upturning of the
sedimented habits of knowledge making, even if dreaming might hold that
potential.

This chain of essays plays with the claim that technoscience is
compelling for its ability to create not only facts, but also
affectively charged temporized imaginaries. In these essays, I
differentiate between kinds of speculation, attending to the often
politically polyvalent work that dreaming futures does. More pointedly I
ask, how have girls and women been the objects of ongoing postcolonial
technoscientific speculative practices? Importantly, I do not mean
actual women and girls, but rather the figure of women and girls as a
figment of transnational social science, postcolonial development, and
speculative practices.

Over the second half of the twentieth century, a multitude of cold
war/postcolonial social science practices of development unfolded, each
obsessed with women and girls, each projecting potent phantasma for the
historian to notice. This thick globalized history of speculating about
the future within development summoned the abstracted figure of girls as
raced and gendered subjects in need of saving, enlightenment,
protection, or investment. Figures of girls and women, whose bodies were
the conduit to the future of the nation, often were the focus of
development social science practices that conjured possible better and
worse futures for decolonized places and brown bodies. Much of the
planet was plotted as under the threat of a population bomb contained in
the potential of women’s wombs, a bomb which could derail all other
development projects aimed at creating a more prosperous economic
modernity. Female bodies thus became a site that had to be calculated,
forecasted, and intervened in for the sake of a promissory future of
economic betterment, both for the individual and the nation. The
dreamscapes of cold war/postcolonial social science were thick with
female bodies and their future sexuality, fertility, rationality,
deviance, health, longevity, and productivity.

This series opens with one of the earliest examples of feminist science
fiction, “Sultana’s Dream.” It then turns to the demographic transition,
a model that helped to forecast the “population bomb,” followed by a
final meditation on the rise of financialized “invest in a girl”
campaigns at the end of the twentieth century. Together these shorts
essays aspire to provoke consideration of the potency of
technoscientific dreaming.

From a historical perspective, there are many futures. That is,
futurity, the epistemological and affective orientation towards the
future, has multiple historical forms. In Futures Past, Reinhart
Koselleck examines the relationships between past, present, and
future in European thought.

He argues that until the 18th century, European Christian
temporality was shaped by a sense of continuity and sameness: today
is like tomorrow, because time has moved according to external
forces only interrupted at the end times, when the world will end.
In the 18^th^ century, a sense of historical time congealed, in
which the past differs from and shapes the arriving future. Thus, in
historical time, the past accumulates to explain the peculiarity of
the present, while the future becomes a horizon of expectation
progressing forward. In historical time, the present becomes a
shifting ratio of marching modernity between what was and what will
be next. While we might quibble with Koselleck’s Euro-centric
typology of time, the important methodological point is that we can
historicize futurity as a relational effect and trace the work of
technoscience in generating particular ways of doing futurity. As
historians, we can investigate varieties of “futurities” co-existing
and intermingling, but still distinguishable from one another, in
the twentieth century. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004). ↩